Restatement of Policy on Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  James F. Byrnes, the US secretary of state, delivered the "Restatement of Policy on Germany" in Stuttgart on the 6th of September, 1946. It quickly acquired a second name: the Speech of Hope. That hope was not evenly distributed. Germans in the occupation zones heard it as a turn toward reconstruction and a future worth imagining. Poles heard something more troubling: an American suggestion that the borders they had been given might not be permanent.

  A month after Stuttgart, Byrnes described the speech's real purpose. "The nub of our program was to win the German people... it was a battle between us and Russia over minds," he said. What drove the United States to make such a public statement in 1946? And why did a speech named for hope deepen the divide between Warsaw and Washington?

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• 2. The Thousand-Calorie Choice

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  General Lucius D. Clay put the dilemma facing American occupiers in stark numerical terms. "There is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on a thousand," he said. The Morgenthau Plan, the wartime blueprint for postwar Germany, had pointed toward exactly the kind of deprivation Clay described. Western officials feared that a population kept hungry would be drawn toward Soviet influence. Addressing that fear was, at its core, the task Byrnes' Stuttgart address took on.

  Byrnes announced that German economic recovery now served American interests. The speech marked a formal break from wartime planning that had imagined a Germany stripped of industrial power. Alongside that economic signal, Byrnes made a pledge with broader implications: the United States would maintain a military presence in Europe indefinitely. For observers watching from Moscow, that statement had obvious meaning. But the speech's most contested passages were not about economics or troop deployments. They concerned Germany's borders, and whose land those borders would protect.

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• 3. The Oder-Neisse Question

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  On the question of German territorial integrity, Byrnes left no ambiguity in Stuttgart. He stated that the United States would not support any partition of Germany that its people did not genuinely want. Specifically, he said, the people of the Ruhr area and the Rhineland wished to stay united with the rest of Germany. "The United States is not going to oppose their desire," he added. The one named exception was the Saarland, where Byrnes supported France's claim.

  Poland's western boundary, set at the Oder-Neisse line, was the most explosive subject Byrnes addressed. East of that line lay roughly 25% of Germany as it had existed in 1937. This territory had come to Poland as compensation for land ceded to the Soviet Union east of the Curzon Line at Yalta. Byrnes set the Polish claims in historical context. "The Soviets and the Poles suffered greatly at the hands of Hitler's invading armies," he said. He stated that the United States would support revisions of Poland's northern and western frontiers in Poland's favor. But Byrnes did not commit those revisions to permanence. The final determination of how much territory east of the Oder-Neisse would become permanently Polish, he said, would wait for a future peace settlement. Polish communist leader Władysław Gomułka was among the first to respond publicly.

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• 4. Warsaw's Alarm

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  Władysław Gomułka, the Polish communist leader, condemned Byrnes' speech and branded its implication of a border revision in Germany's favor reactionary. In his view, the speech made a strong Polish-Soviet alliance even more essential. The Polish communist government responded officially with loud rhetoric, claiming the Potsdam border was final. It also accused Washington of supporting remnants of the Hitler regime.

  Wojciech Jaruzelski, another Polish communist leader, reflected on the speech's impact many years afterward. "It was a shocking statement," he recalled. "It made us think that our western border was being questioned by the Germans and by other Western countries." He added: "It was one of the most important things that strengthened our ties with the Soviet Union."

  Olszewski asked the US ambassador for an explanation of Byrnes' remarks. He argued that the speech threatened Poles from beyond the Curzon Line who were relocating into the western territories. Ambassador Arthur Bliss Lane tried to reassure Polish officials that the speech did not signal American intent to abandon Potsdam obligations. Lane noted that Poland held provisional control over the territory and blamed any misconceptions on the Polish government and press themselves. He was disturbed by what he saw as distortion of the speech's meaning. From November 1946 onward, the US military government in Germany quietly prepared a series of new alternative border plans.

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• 5. What the Speech Achieved

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  Lane, after consulting members of the State Department, eventually learned the speech's actual design. The purpose of Byrnes' address, and of related US diplomatic activities, had been propaganda aimed at Germany. The Western Powers could thereby blame the Polish-German border and the German expulsions on Moscow alone. "Smoke out Molotov's attitude on the eve of elections in Germany" was the purpose Lane eventually learned the speech had carried.

  George Marshall pressed the case for border revision at the 1947 Council of Foreign Ministers meetings, first in Moscow and then in London. He argued for the return of agricultural areas, including Pomerania and Silesia, to Germany. Poland, in his proposal, would keep a large part of eastern Pomerania and Upper Silesia, as well as Gdańsk and East Prussia. Britain and France backed this position. Marshall also advocated a four-power commission charged with deciding the extent of border revisions in Germany's favor. In private, American policymakers, including Marshall, held no illusions about the outcome. The chances of actually changing the border were, Marshall admitted, "very slender."

  The Soviet Union, to secure Polish loyalty, was forced to commit itself publicly to the Oder-Neisse line. That commitment was forced by the logic Byrnes set in motion in Stuttgart. It meant the Soviet Union had surrendered any realistic chance of gaining influence over West Germany.

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